"... Consider a committee which must select one alternative from a set of three or more alternatives. Committee members each cast a ballot which the voting procedure counts. The voting procedure is strategy-proof if it always induces every committee member to cast a ballot revealing his preference. I pro ..."

to Jean-Marie Blin, Richard Day, Theodore Groves, Rubin Saposnik, Maria Schmundt, Hugo Sonnenschein, and an anonymous referee for their help in the development of this paper. 1 Farquharson [4] introduced the terms sophisticated strategy and sincere strategy.

"... We consider the problem of finding the unconstrained global minimum of a realvalued polynomial p(x) : R R, as well as the global minimum of p(x), in a compact set K defined by polynomial inequalities. It is shown that this problem reduces to solving an (often finite) sequence of convex linear mat ..."

We consider the problem of finding the unconstrained global minimum of a realvalued polynomial p(x) : R R, as well as the global minimum of p(x), in a compact set K defined by polynomial inequalities. It is shown that this problem reduces to solving an (often finite) sequence of convex linear matrix inequality (LMI) problems. A notion of Karush--Kuhn--Tucker polynomials is introduced in a global optimality condition. Some illustrative examples are provided. Key words. global optimization, theory of moments and positive polynomials, semidefinite programming AMS subject classifications. 90C22, 90C25 PII. S1052623400366802 1.

"... We present a novel statistical and variational approach to image segmentation based on a new algorithm named region competition. This algorithm is derived by minimizing a generalized Bayes/MDL criterion using the variational principle. The algorithm is guaranteed to converge to a local minimum and c ..."

We present a novel statistical and variational approach to image segmentation based on a new algorithm named region competition. This algorithm is derived by minimizing a generalized Bayes/MDL criterion using the variational principle. The algorithm is guaranteed to converge to a local minimum and combines aspects of snakes/balloons and region growing. Indeed the classic snakes/balloons and region growing algorithms can be directly derived from our approach. We provide theoretical analysis of region competition including accuracy of boundary location, criteria for initial conditions, and the relationship to edge detection using filters. It is straightforward to generalize the algorithm to multiband segmentation and we demonstrate it on grey level images, color images and texture images. The novel color model allows us to eliminate intensity gradients and shadows, thereby obtaining segmentation based on the albedos of objects. It also helps detect highlight regions. 1 Division of Appli...

"... This paper presents for the first time the semantic foundations of CLP in a self-contained and complete package. The main contributions are threefold. First, we extend the original conference paper by presenting definitions and basic semantic constructs from first principles, giving new and comp ..."

This paper presents for the first time the semantic foundations of CLP in a self-contained and complete package. The main contributions are threefold. First, we extend the original conference paper by presenting definitions and basic semantic constructs from first principles, giving new and complete proofs for the main lemmas. Importantly, we clarify which theorems depend on conditions such as solution compactness, satisfaction completeness and independence of constraints. Second, we generalize the original results to allow for incompleteness of the constraint solver. This is important since almost all CLP systems use an incomplete solver. Third, we give conditions on the (possibly incomplete) solver which ensure that the operational semantics is confluent, that is, has independence of literal scheduling.

"... . In Proc. European Conf. Computer Vision, 1996, pp. 343--356, Cambridge, UK The problem of tracking curves in dense visual clutter is a challenging one. Trackers based on Kalman filters are of limited use; because they are based on Gaussian densities which are unimodal, they cannot represent s ..."

. In Proc. European Conf. Computer Vision, 1996, pp. 343--356, Cambridge, UK The problem of tracking curves in dense visual clutter is a challenging one. Trackers based on Kalman filters are of limited use; because they are based on Gaussian densities which are unimodal, they cannot represent simultaneous alternative hypotheses. Extensions to the Kalman filter to handle multiple data associations work satisfactorily in the simple case of point targets, but do not extend naturally to continuous curves. A new, stochastic algorithm is proposed here, the Condensation algorithm --- Conditional Density Propagation over time. It uses `factored sampling', a method previously applied to interpretation of static images, in which the distribution of possible interpretations is represented by a randomly generated set of representatives. The Condensation algorithm combines factored sampling with learned dynamical models to propagate an entire probability distribution for object pos...

"... This paper considers an application of blind identification to beamforming. The key point is to use estimates of directional vectors rather than resorting to their hypothesized value. By using estimates of the directional vectors obtained via blind identification i.e. without knowing the arrray mani ..."

This paper considers an application of blind identification to beamforming. The key point is to use estimates of directional vectors rather than resorting to their hypothesized value. By using estimates of the directional vectors obtained via blind identification i.e. without knowing the arrray manifold, beamforming is made robust with respect to array deformations, distortion of the wave front, pointing errors, etc ... so that neither array calibration nor physical modeling are necessary. Rather surprisingly, `blind beamformers' may outperform `informed beamformers' in a plausible range of parameters, even when the array is perfectly known to the informed beamformer. The key assumption blind identification relies on is the statistical independence of the sources, which we exploit using fourth-order cumulants. A computationally efficient technique is presented for the blind estimation of directional vectors, based on joint diagonalization of 4th-order cumulant matrices

"... A new motion planning method for robots in static workspaces is presented. This method proceeds in two phases: a learning phase and a query phase. In the learning phase, a probabilistic roadmap is constructed and stored as a graph whose nodes correspond to collision-free configurations and whose edg ..."

A new motion planning method for robots in static workspaces is presented. This method proceeds in two phases: a learning phase and a query phase. In the learning phase, a probabilistic roadmap is constructed and stored as a graph whose nodes correspond to collision-free configurations and whose edges correspond to feasible paths between these configurations. These paths are computed using a simple and fast local planner. In the query phase, any given start and goal configurations of the robot are connected to two nodes of the roadmap; the roadmap is then searched for a path joining these two nodes. The method is general and easy to implement. It can be applied to virtually any type of holonomic robot. It requires selecting certain parameters (e.g., the duration of the learning phase) whose values depend on the scene, that is the robot and its workspace. But these values turn out to be relatively easy to choose, Increased efficiency can also be achieved by tailoring some components of the method (e.g., the local planner) to the considered robots. In this paper the method is applied to planar articulated robots with many degrees of freedom. Experimental results show that path planning can be done in a fraction of a second on a contemporary workstation (=150 MIPS), after learning for relatively short periods of time (a few dozen seconds)